Bobby and Syd Lea

Their Common Life

Bobby Lea is quiet. Syd Lea is exuberant. Bobby is an Olympic bike racer. Syd is a Special Olympics bike racer. One of these brothers just might need the other more than anyone ever imagined.

jack mccallum

His mom and dad put him on the bike and Bobby loved it, coercion unnecessary. One of his earliest memories is competing as a four-year-old and getting nipped (Syd might say "nibbled") because he slowed down in the backstretch. "I thought you had to stop right on the finish line," he says. Bobby won his first national title in 1997 when he was 13 and started racking up those college titles a few years after that. He grew tall—he's 6-foot-2 now, the same as Syd—and strong, though at 170 he's not particularly muscular. He's built just a little too big to fit into the traditional road racer's mold, but is ideal for endurance track events—which he wryly refers to as "the red-haired stepchild of U.S. Cycling."

For 12 years now, Bobby has trained near his Pennsylvania home, where he can set out in almost any direction and pedal long, unpopulated stretches of rural road into an array of small towns, the quaintness cup running over. Sally Ann Furnace Road. Huffs Church. Dryville. Fleetwood. Virginville. One of his favorite midride stops is Wanamaker's General Store—which is exactly what its name says rather than a tourist attraction with a charming façade. And when he rides into "downtown" Topton, he might be able to cadge a PBR at the White Palm Tavern, which hands out a free beer when a train whizzing by on the nearby tracks sounds its whistle.

The converted schoolhouse (complete with tower bell) in a place called Topton sounds like the quintessential domestic setup for a quiet cyclist who left home when he was 15 and trains mostly alone, sometimes setting off on jaunts as long as six hours. But Lea's life isn't monastic. A decade ago he met a high school senior named Erin Vavra when he volunteered to visit a class to give a bike-safety course. It took a while for Bobby to make the right move ("I had no game," he says), but they now live together. "I'm a first-grade teacher living in a schoolhouse," says Erin. "Sometimes I can't believe that myself."

THE JANUARY WIND BLOWS cold and unceasingly across the campus of Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, about 15 miles south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Syd, who works two or three days a week, is out in the middle of it, digging trenches. His shift is over at 3.

"Tell you the truth, I'd like to have Syd here more," says his boss, Elvin Wolfe, the Mount St. Mary's grounds manager. "He's a great worker." When Syd started five years ago Wolfe put him with a job coach, but it wasn't long before Syd could handle the small tasks alone. Then the big tasks. Now, in the summer, Syd himself leads a small crew of interns and high-school kids.

"Sure, there are limitations," says Wolfe. "He doesn't always know the names of plants, for example. But there are limitations with every worker. And certain things, like weed whacking, Syd does better than anyone."

It is time for Syd to drive home, which conjures up the most colorful part of Syd lore—his Sisyphean struggle to get a driver's license. The story goes that Syd passed the on-road test on the first shot—though there is some dispute about that in the family record—but everyone agrees he needed what might be a state record of 25 passes at the written portion. After he finally made the mark, a state trooper put his arm on Syd's shoulder and said, "Well, Mr. Lea, we were about to put a nameplate for you on that chair."